Please plan to join IBM and thousands of your peers at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, March 3 to 6, 2013.

PULSE 2013 is IBM’s premier event focused on business transformation and IT optimization, helping clients learn how to turn opportunities into outcomes.

As the planet becomes smarter, it becomes clear that a solid, robust, scalable and cost-effective IT infrastructure is required to create, store and manage all the information at the heart of these new opportunities.

Unified Recovery and Storage Management is the cornerstone track within the Cloud and IT Optimization stream at PULSE 2013. We are putting together a very excited agenda, and I’d like to give you a preview of what you can learn from your peers, thought leaders, and yes, a few IBMers, by attending this track.

We kick off the track on Monday with a keynote presentation by Dave Russell, Research Vice President at Gartner. Dave will describe the trends that his team is seeing, and encourage you to take a position on transforming and optimizing your data management infrastructure.

During the 3 days of breakout sessions, you will learn how many of our customers have started on this journey, including best practices and outcomes. Our speakers include subject matter experts from:

• Two major banks• Two universities• Five healthcare organizations• Several consumer and industrial companies• Five managed service providers• A leader in media and entertainment

Some of the top-of-mind topics that will be covered include management and protection of virtualized server and storage environments; advancements in disaster recovery and business continuity; storage in the Cloud, storage as the Cloud, and storage to the Cloud; backup consolidation and simplification; and how to easily cost-justify an efficiency improvement project to your management.

You can also learn how IBM “eats its own cooking” as the IBM Office of the CIO describes its use of IBM storage management software to drive costs out of our business while meeting the computing demands of a company the size of IBM.

You will also have the opportunity to learn about new products and enhancements – we can’t tell you what they are yet, but we’re pretty excited.

You can see who our expert speakers are, what they’ll be speaking about, and start to build your experience at Pulse this year by visiting the Pulse SmartSite and Agenda Builder at: http://www.pulsesmartsite.com/

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."

We’re getting deep into the planning for our 6th annual PULSE conference (ibm.com/pulse), and I’m getting very excited about the storage content that is being assembled. Again, it will be at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, March 3 – 6, 2013.

At our Storage Track Kickoff session, we’ll have some new things to announce and highlight, and we’re close to announcing an exciting keynote speaker.

Following the track kickoff, we’ll have 20 breakout sessions on data protection and storage management topics, covering advances in virtual machine protection, disaster recovery, cloud integration, and a lot more. We’re mixing it up a lot more this year to ensure you get a range of perspectives. We’ll have 21 client speakers discussing their experiences and best practices; plus 8 business and technology partners providing insights into added value approaches to storage management who will be complemented by IBMers sharing the new stuff we’ve been working on.

Among the client speakers will be storage professionals from across the globe representing major banking, healthcare, media, industrial and university organizations. There will also be sessions on a variety of cloud topics, including private cloud storage and backup-as-a-service opportunities.

To follow on a theme mentioned by Steve Mills in his keynote at PULSE 2012, we’ll show how IBM “eats its own cooking”, sharing how IBM’s Office of the CIO transformed its massive storage infrastructure; and how IBM’s Strategic Outsourcing services organization is leveraging our products to more effectively manage their clients’ storage environments.

There will be many cool things to see in the expo center again this year, including offerings from many of our ecosystem partners, and you can roll up your sleeves in the hands-on labs and product training and certification areas.

Have you heard about this year’s PULSE PALOOZA entertainment? We rocked the Grand Garden Arena with Maroon5 in 2012, and will follow that with Carrie Underwood in 2013.

Now’s the time to act. Early bird registration, which saves client attendees $500 off the conference fee, closes December 31st. Go to http://ibm.co/pulseregister and get ready for an outstanding event. I look forward to seeing you there.

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."

I recently read an excellent post by Ron Riffe, a fellow IBMer discussing practical recommendations for introducing cloud techniques into a private storage environment – the end goal being to save your company a substantial amount of money while becoming more responsive to the needs of the business. The first of the four steps discussed in the post was to introduce a storage hypervisor – virtualization of your storage infrastructure. It’s a good idea, especially if you have already virtualized some or all of your production server environment with something like VMware.

But there’s more to it than just the efficiency and mobility you get from virtualizing. The customers we talk to are finding new value that rises out of the synergy when both the server and storage environments are virtualized. One example is in the area of data protection. In this post, I’m going to explain the 1+1=3 effect for data protection that comes from combining VMware with a good storage hypervisor.

Let’s start with a quick walk down memory lane. Do you remember what your data protection environment looked like before virtualization? There was a server with an operating system and an application… and that thing had a backup agent on it to capture backup copies and send them someplace (most likely over an IP network) for safe keeping. It worked, but it took a lot of time to deploy and maintain all the agents, a lot of bandwidth to transmit the data, and a lot of disk or tapes to store it all. The topic of data protection has modernized quite a bit since then.

Today, you’re using a server hypervisor (VMware) to efficiently pack several virtual machines onto one physical server – and to make it so you can deploy, move and decommission those VMs pretty much at will. If you are still using the old techniques for data protection (deploying an agent on each individual VM, and then transferring all the backup data for those VMs through the one IP network pipe) on that physical server, you’re probably running into significant performance and application availability problems, and also missing out on some significant savings (if you listen carefully, you can hear your backup environment screaming ‘modernize me, MODERNIZE ME!”).

Fast forward to today. Modernization has come from three different sources – the server hypervisor, the storage hypervisor and the unified recovery manager. The end result is a data protection environment that captures all the data it needs in one coordinated snapshot action, efficiently stores those snapshots, and provides for recovery of just about any slice of data you could want. It’s quite the beautiful thing.

Data capture: VMware has provided a nice set of APIs that allow disk arrays and backup vendors to intelligently drive snapshots of a VMware datastore (for the techies, these are the vStorage API’s for Data Protection, or VADP). The problem is that integration from a disk array to these API’s is a tier-1 kind of service that is found on very few disk arrays today. That’s where a good storage hypervisor comes in. A storage hypervisor will include its own integration between VMware VADP and hardware-assist snapshot and it will plug the control GUI directly into the VMware vCenter management console. That means, regardless of what type of disk array capacity you have chosen to use for your VMware data, the storage hypervisor will be able to do a hardware-assisted snapshot of the VMware datastore (all your VMs at once – sweet!).

Efficient storage: Here’s a scenario we see…

Administrators want to snapshot the VMware datastore 4 times a day. 4 days worth are maintained – 16 total snapshots “online”

For longer term recovery, they promote one snapshot each day to a unified recovery manager. 1 month of these are maintained – 31 total snapshots “nearline”

The snapshots can add up, so efficiency is important. For the “online” snapshots, a good storage hypervisor stores only incremental changes, compresses the result and stores it as a thin provisioned volume on lower-tier disk capacity (the new 3TB SAS drives make a nice choice). Notice in this scenario, the administrator is also promoting one of the snapshots each day (say, the midnight snapshot) to an enterprise recovery manager. If you are using IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery, then it will insert deduplication in the list of efficiency techniques being applied to the snapshot (incremental snapshots that are deduplicated, compressed, and stored on lower-tier disk… that’s about as efficient as it gets).

Flexible recovery: Whether the snapshot is online or nearline, the only reason you have it is so that you can recover when something (anything) goes wrong. A good hypervisor / unified recovery manager combination will give VMware administrators the ability to peer inside the snapshot and recover individual files, virtual volumes, or entire VMs. Using the scenario above, your recovery point would be no more than 6 hours old for the last 4 days, and your recovery time would be measured in minutes.

IBM offers one of the worlds best known unified recovery managers and the worlds most widely deployed storage hypervisor. With over 7000 storage hypervisor deployments, we’ve had a lot of opportunity to build some depth. Deep integration with VMware for modernizing your data protection environment is one example. If you are running VMware and haven’t yet modernized data protection, IBM can help. You can learn more at the following links.

Join the conversation! The virtual dialogue on this topic will continue in a live group chat on September 23, 2011 from 12 noon to 1pm Eastern Time. Join some of the Top 20 storage bloggers, key industry analysts and IBM Storage subject matter experts to discuss storage hypervisors and get questions answered about improving your private storage environment.

There is a huge transformation happening in IT organizations! These organizations are migrating from single-purpose physical servers to consolidated virtual machine technologies. The benefits of virtualization are many: cutting acquisition, management and facilities costs by reducing the number of physical machines; increasing service levels through faster server provisioning; and enabling new delivery models such as cloud services. However, virtualizing servers does not reduce the amount of data that is created and stored; actually it can have the opposite effect as virtual machines are moved or de-provisioned. This presentation will describe smarter ways of managing all this data and the infrastructure that stores it, and feature IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center family of products.

There is no question that server virtualization has been a boost to the businesses that have embraced it, but it is also causing huge headaches for storage administrators. Join IBM industry leaders for this live, interactive event, as they introduce the newest addition to the Tivoli Storage Manager family that was built to provide advanced data protection and fast, flexible recovery of your VMware environments. This online-only event allows you to hear from experts as they review TSM for Virtual Environments and demonstrate how it can help you reduce costs while meeting service level requirements. This event will include a 20 minute presentation, followed by a 20 minute live demo of the actual product.

The Tivoli Storage Management team is beginning a new series of educational webcasts for the end user community on a range of topics. The first session will focus on data protection and recovery of virtual server environments -- and you're invited!

Server virtualization has been a boon to the businesses that have embraced it, but it is causing huge headaches for storage administrators. One area of particular concern is backup and recovery, especially as the use of virtual servers grows in production environments.

Are all of the Virtual Machines (VMs) covered with appropriate backup policies? Are you able to manage the sprawl of backup agents as the number of VMs increases? Are you having trouble meeting backup windows and recovery SLAs on your VMs?

Join IBM as we introduce you to the newest addition to the TSM family that is built to provide advanced data protection and fast, flexible recovery of your VMware environments. Join us as we review TSM for Virtual Environments and how it can help you reduce costs while meeting service level requirements. We will have a 20 minute presentation and a 20 minute live demo of the product.

Yes! Yes! Pulse 2011 was a huge success for Tivoli storage! Each
time I visited our storage peds in the Expo hall, they were jam
packed with customers & Business Partners. What a great way to
start the week with our storage track kickoff session packed to
standing room only! That seemed to be par for the course all week
at all of the storage sessions. So, we're going on the record now
to say "first floor, bigger rooms, please!" @Pulse 2012. Because
after all, Tivoli storage rocked Pulse 2011! Great momentum that we
can capitalize on all year. Nice job, everyone!

Pulse 2011 is wrapping up today, and it has been an awesome week for the Tivoli Storage Management team. Our 12 demonstration peds of combined Tivoli and STG storage products in the Solutions Expo have been swamped since the show opened on Sunday evening. An introductory session in the Expo on the new Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments (TSM for VE) had 5 rows of people standing behind the available seating.

The Storage Track kickoff on Monday morning was also jammed, and Rachel Dines of Forrester gave a great speech on how minor changes in your storage environment can have massive, rippling impacts; and provide excellent tips on how to avoid problems through effective storage management practices.

We almost had a massive disaster in our breakout sessions, which were all led by customers and technology partners -- our assigned rooms were way too small for the huge numbers of people that wanted to hear what their peers had to share. Luckily we were able to find bigger space in time of the second session. Kudos to the staff of the MGM Grand for stepping up and rearranging the meeting rooms on no notice and getting it done during a short scheduled break.

All of the breakout sessions were well attended and well received. In successive sessions on Tuesday, three different approaches for protecting VMware systems were presented, with TSM for VE being the highlight. But the really cool moment was when TSM for VE was demonstrated live in front of more than 7000 people in the general session Tuesday morning.

This was my 4th Pulse event, and really the best part of it is meeting so many of the customers, partners and other IBMers that I work with by phone and e-mail all year. Talking face-to-face, sharing a meal or a drink (or two) does so much for strengthening business relationships.I wish we could have everyone attend just for that reason.

One thing that is true of all events in Las Vegas -- they are exhausting. But as I tell everyone, if you aren't tired, you aren't doing it right.

Thank you to everyone that attended and contributed to the success of Pulse 2011. I hope to see everyone at Pulse "V5" next year, the first week of March 2012.

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."

Customers use IBM FastBack for Storwize V7000 to help reduce the amount of data at risk between backups to almost zero, and to reduce the time to recover from almost any data loss to just seconds. IBM FastBack for Storwize V7000 also includes built-in target-side data deduplication, and deduplication across locations when consolidating backups to a central Tivoli Storage Manager system. IBM FastBack for Storwize V7000 also includes fast, granular recovery of Microsoft Exchange e-mail objects, including messages, attachments, contacts, calendars, notes, tasks and journals.

Using IBM FastBack for Storwize V7000, administrators can select which volumes to replicate and then schedule when to send the data over the Wide Area Network (WAN) or Internet, thereby enabling IP replication capabilities for the IBM Storwize V7000 and effective disaster recovery capabilities without straining existing bandwidth.

IBM FastBack for Storwize V7000 delivers a cost-effective data protection and disaster recovery offering for small and mid-sized organizations. It combines a number of leading-edge, patented technologies to deliver a data protection and recovery offering for servers and applications by helping to:

o Eliminate the need for traditional backup windows by continuously tracking data changes at the block level, with extremely low overhead on the systems it protects o Improve recovery service levels and meet stringent data protection and retention requirements through use of a flexible policy engine

IBM FastBack for Storwize V7000 can enable protection, replication, and recovery of data for critical applications, including IBM DB2, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, SAP, and Oracle. It delivers the power to quickly help recover any Microsoft Windows, or Linux server data, from anywhere in the organization and any point in time.

IBM FastBack for Storwize V7000 can store all of the data onto the IBM Storwize V7000 and can replicate that data to an offsite location to another FastBack for Storwize V7000 system, or to a Tivoli Storage Manager Server, for disaster recovery purposes. In addition, IBM FastBack for Storwize V7000 V6.1 can be utilized to help protect production data that resides outside of the IBM Storwize V7000.

On February 22, 2011, IBM announced the newest member of the IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager family of unified recovery management solutions.

While Tivoli Storage Manager already provides a very effective solution for the challenge of protecting VMware systems, the new IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments offering provides additional improvements for backup efficiencies and advanced recovery capabilities. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments eliminates the burden of running backups on a virtual machine by leveraging VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data Protection, which offload backup workloads from the virtual guest machines to a centralized vStorage backup server. The vStorage backup server takes full and incremental snapshots of virtual machines, processes the backups and sends the results to an IBM Tivoli Storage Manager server.

The central vStorage server can itself be installed in a VMware guest, and requires no storage capacity of its own, so this advanced solution can be implemented without the need to additional hardware.

Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments provides customers with flexible recovery options: restore individual files, disk volumes or entire Virtual Machines from a single-pass backup. Access to full Microsoft® Windows and Linux® disk volumes can be restored in just a few minutes while the data is copied in the background, reducing downtime by hours or days.

Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments also includes the ability to automatically discover new Virtual Machines as they are brought on-line, and auto-assign backup policies so that all data remains protected.

Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments integrates with and extends the role of Tivoli Storage Manager in meeting needs for backup and recovery, online database and application protection, disaster recovery, data reduction, bare-machine recovery, space management, and archiving and retrieval. In the virtualized environment, it provides both improved frequency of backups to reduce the amount of data at risk, and faster recovery of data to reduce downtime following a failure.